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The New Privacy Policy: Desensitization

In Preston Russett’s Contemporary Portrait of Information Privacy the concept of online desensitization is discussed. Personal information is out there to be viewed on the web. However as users we have become used to seeing it all the time.

Think about Facebook, everyone sees everything. All of your information like what you like, who you’re friends with, where you live, where you go to school, your cellphone number. All of this information is basically available to everyone yet we aren’t bothered by it. Knowing that our information is out there doesn’t prevent us

from still going forward maintaining accounts and creating new ones. “Selective disclosure and personal information manipulation are now more important than ever, because at any moment, any action and behavior can be recorded, analyzed and used against us. We live in an era of collection and individual communicative consequences for all of us operating in this digital age” (49). Russett discusses the risks involved in exploiting online information. Users should consider the consequences that come from having information documented digitally.